Steve Perry Reportedly Sues to Prevent Demo Releases

Steve Perry has allegedly filed legal action to prevent demo recordings from the early ‘90s from being released, according to a new report.

The former Journey singer became involved in a dispute over eight songs tracked in a low-quality environment with a musician named Phil Brown, who was paid $1,500 to work with an eight-track recorder in his garage. Perry was said to be seeking an injunction against the resulting music’s release along with unspecified damages.

In legal document reported to have been seen by The Blast, Perry said “he did not perform them as he would if the recordings were intended for public release.” He went on to accuse Brown’s management of “deceptively associating” him with Brown and his band, “falsely implying that [he] is a member of Brown’s band, and threatening to release certain old vocal performances … even though [he] owns all intellectual property rights in said vocal performances.”

Perry added that “Brown abandoned any claim to those performances in 2002” and that he’d “repeatedly demanded that Brown not release those works.” He went on to allege that the timing of the attempted release was deliberate, because his comeback solo album Traces is currently “in wide release and garnering significant publicity.” “Brown is seeking to confuse and mislead Perry’s fans and the consuming public into believing that Brown is associated with Perry when he is not, to induce them to purchase Brown’s music rather than Perry’s,” the paperwork stated.

Traces arrived last month, and in multiple interviews, the singer rejected the idea of reuniting with Journey. In one of them, Perry said he was “not too excited about going backward. ... I’m more excited about moving forward to what is next. I’ve already written a lot more new material, in fact.”